Tumblr

So, Ally got me using Twitter, mainly I think so that she can keep an eye on me while away at University. And I always thought it was me as her father that would want to keep tabs on my daughter!

Anyway, it's been fun tweeting and it made me think about how interactive can, and ultimately should, we be via the internet. I've resisted the urge to sign up for Facebook or Myspace or the over fifties version run by Saga. However that's a debate for another day.

The thing with Twitter is that it isn't really a route to use for quick thoughts and quotes etc. Jeff put me onto Swurl and I've set up a homepage there to collate various streams (blogs, music, Twitter, wish lists). 

And because Swurl does the job of putting everything you want to put in one place in... well one place actually, there's no need to spend all day updating a whole range of social sites with duplicate information. It also means that if, like me, you write more than one blog, then you can pull all of them into one place for anyone interested to read all your musing but who doesn't use RSS or similar to aggregate blogs. But that still doesn't solve the problem of posting a quick thought without logging in and creating new posts.

So, to complete the picture so far, I've added Tumblr to my streams. It's a simple, quick thoughts kind of approach to blogging. Using my Blog title "the view from here" I now have a Tumblr homepage, but all the things I post there will automatically appear on the Swurl page. I'm also working on how to add my Tumblr blog to the sidebar of my main blog but I'm having a few problems getting the size right.

Being a Mac user I've also found a dashboard widget, or rather two dashboard widgets for Tumblr. 

The first is available from the Tumblr site, the second from the Apple downloads site. I prefer the second one because it has some automatic formatting built in for posting regular text or pictures or quotes. 

Both are free, so you just choose your preferred style I guess.